THE ROLE OF INTERACTIVE LEARNING OBJECTS IN AN ADAPTIVE E-LEARNING SYSTEM

This paper presents the ADAPT project, a distance adaptive learning platform whose domain application is, in an initial phase, for digital systems. The topics covered were: Introduction to Digital Systems, Boolean Algebra, Analysis and Synthesis of combinational circuits, Analysis and Synthesis of sequential circuits. This LMS makes use of some Artificial Intelligence (AI) models and techniques while having the ability to adapt course contents to the learning preferences of each student. Through theses techniques this platform enables: The Capture of students performance and learning styles, cases of success and failure and the correspondent appropriateness of the learning content of each profile; The automatic learning, based on the paths of better performance also on success and failure cases, is generated. This paper focuses on the description of the use of alternative representations of the content, in order to accommodate the different learning styles of students. For that, we analysed several learning styles models with the objective of classifying and characterizing how students receive and process information. Myers-Briggs, Kolb, Felder-Silverman and VARK will be described in the paper. One of the ITS module functionalities is to define the type of content to be presented according to the preferable learning style of a student. The student profile is obtained from the Felder - Silverman questionnaire. The content is classified according the VARK model. So, after making the classification of the stored data and the determination of a student learning profile a relationship between a particular content type and the dimensions of personality style model will be established. For this purpose we opted for the mapping of the Felder-Silverman model with the VARK model. In the ADAPT platform context, fuzzy logic is used to perform this mapping. The fuzzy system allows the system to determine the most appropriate content to show each student according to his/her profile. The developed content types were slides with text and images (in .ppt and .pdf formats) for visual and reading/writing students, narrated audio for auditory students and animations for kinesthetic students. However, an e-learning system to be successful should motivate the student through pedagogic and interactive techniques. So, in this work we gave special attention to the use of interactive animations through appropriate metaphors leading to a better understanding of the students, especially those who have a kinesthetic profile. The idea of the interactive animations is to teach concepts, making a framework to support deeper comprehension. We consider that textbook concepts, by themselves, might not be transparent to students and could not help students build concepts. For that there is a need of a platform supporting personally relevant activities through significant interactions. Through an active experimentation students could not only learn concepts but also clarify doubts and misconceptions. So, a special attention was given to the construction of animation, some of them were explained in this paper. In conducting content for educational purposes there should be a need to keep in mind several concerns with regard to the content presentation and the developed layout. So, the set of used generic concerns following the Jakob Nielsen's heuristics in order to enable better interactions were also described.